The Houston Independent School District’s ongoing de-Confederatizing process continues. Earlier this week they released a list of proposed new names for schools currently named for Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Dick Dowling, Albert Sidney Johnston, John Reagan, and Sidney Lanier.

Three of the schools would take the names of their neighborhoods: Northside High School is to replace Davis, Heights High School is to replace Reagan, and the Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts Middle School is to replace Johnston. A teacher (Margaret Long Wisdom) and two community leaders (Yolanda Black Navarro and Audrey Lawson) are also on the list of proposed changes that the board will vote for on Thursday, though the Reverend Bill Lawson, Audrey’s widower, has twice asked that her name be withdrawn from consideration, citing a local preference for a much-beloved teacher in Dick Dowling Middle School’s Hiram Clarke neighborhood.

And then there’s the Lanier-to-Lanier proposal. The board has proposed changing merely the first name of Sidney Lanier Middle School to Bob Lanier Middle School, to honor a former Houston mayor, a man with a far more complex legacy than Wisdom, Navarro, or Lawson.

First, a brief refresher on the school’s current namesake. Sidney Lanier was a private in the Confederate army who later repudiated his service and “rejoiced” at the downfall of slavery. Lanier won his fame as a poet and musician after the war. Unlike Davis, Lee, and Jackson and their like, he was no rebel leader—he later described himself as a teenager who got caught up in the patriotic frenzy of his native Georgia, where to shirk service was to become a pariah. Though little read today, he was widely-renowned in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and one of the very few literati from the Old South to achieve widespread fame.

Bob Lanier, who passed away in December 2014, served as Houston’s mayor from 1992-1998, presiding over the boom times that followed Houston’s last oil bust. A Baker Botts attorney turned real estate developer, Lanier also served on the Texas Highway Commission and as chairman of Metro, Houston’s transit authority.

His supporters claim he tamped down Houston’s rampant crime problem and greatly enhanced the city’s crumbling infrastructure. His defense of affirmative action won him awards from the NAACP and others. He began the arduous and still ongoing process of revitalizing Houston’s Midtown and Downtown areas.

The Houston Chronicle praised “the 6-foot-4 cowboy boot-wearing, sports-crazy political sharpshooter who rose from modest beginnings in blue-collar Baytown” highly upon his death, noting that he was likened to Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

Bob Lanier’s popularity cut across racial, ethnic and political party divides. Bob Lanier won many awards recognizing his achievements, including the Hubert Humphrey Civil Rights Award and the Urban Beautification Award.

Lanier did enjoy bipartisan support; Republicans loved his business and developer friendly policies, and the Democrat was very popular in right-leaning enclaves like River Oaks, Meyerland, and the Memorial and Galleria areas. He was not as popular in leftish areas like Montrose (where Sidney Lanier is located) and in African-American districts, where some believe that dirty dealing played a role in Lanier’s defeat of Sylvester Turner in the 1991 mayoral election, robbing Turner of the chance to become Houston’s first black mayor. (Turner, of course, is now the mayor, but Lanier’s successor Lee Brown beat him out as the first black mayor.)

Perhaps the most controversial example of Lanier’s business-oriented vision is the Grand Parkway.

Lanier owned 1,700 acres of Katy prairie that became more valuable once the Grand Parkway passed through and development began there. He voted six times as highway commissioner to approve segments of the regional parkway, abstaining only from the vote on a stretch that would pass through his land, according to Chronicle archives. Later, as Metro chairman, Lanier directed millions to fund design work on the parkway.

He also is credited with orchestrating a coup by the Metro board in 1989 that killed then-mayor Kathy Whitmire’s $650 million plan to construct a state-of-the-art monorail.

It was a defining moment not just because he decided to run for mayor when Whitmire fired him. Opponents say his persistent criticism of rail is a key reason Houston has remained so car dependent.

Environmentalists now believe that the development of the Katy Prairie is a prime factor in Houston’s flooding woes, and mass transit remains a pressing issue, especially in low-income minority neighborhoods from which Lanier diverted funds to faraway ring roads passing through his own land.

And then there is the case of the Fourth Ward, part of which is—or was—known as Freedmen’s Town, thanks to its origin as Houston’s most historic African-American neighborhood. Built in the 1860s by newly liberated slaves, the environs of West Dallas Street were once known as Houston’s Harlem. Jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton once called it home. Folklorist Mack McCormick did some of his best musicological research there, and pinpointed it as the home of L.V. Thomas and Geeshie Wiley, the female blues team responsible for “Last Kind Words Blues.” Churches like the miraculously still-standing Antioch Baptist, whose pastor the Reverend Jack Yates was an early community leader, formed the bedrock of Freedmen’s Town.

The Great Depression sent Freedmen’s Town into a tailspin from which it never recovered. By that time, the Third Ward (southeast of downtown) and the Fifth Ward had emerged as rival centers of African-American life in Houston. In the 1940s, the federal government built San Felipe Courts, a housing project exclusively for blue-collar whites, on land that had once been home to the northern portion of Freedmen’s Town. (Country star Kenny Rogers grew up there.) Blacks were barred from moving in until 1968, and the development was later renamed Allen Parkway Village. Freedmen’s Town was further damaged by the construction of Interstate 45 through the eastern third of the neighborhood. By the 1970s, almost all traces of African-American life east of the new freeway were gone, absorbed by the parking lots and skyscrapers of downtown Houston.

West of the freeway large portions of Fourth Ward and Freedmen’s Town held out. As late as the 1990s, you could still see whole blocks of century-old shotgun houses on brick streets. Close as they were to the downtown skyline, juxtaposing those sights came to be a cliche of Houston photography; the impoverished past and the glittering future in one frame.

And it must be said that by the 1970s, the Fourth Ward had become crime-ridden and dilapidated, many of its residents having fled to suburbs in newly integrated Houston. Still, it was hallowed ground for African Americans, and for some, the only home they had ever known or wanted to know. In 1985, 64 acres and 563 buildings were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, though a fat lot of good that has done: as of 2008, more than 500 of the buildings had been demolished.

Sweeping Freedmen’s Town off the map had been a dream for many a politico for decades. In most Southern cities, neighborhoods like Freedmen’s Town had be erased under the guise of what was once known as “urban renewal” in the 1940s and ‘50s. What remained in Houston was somewhat miraculous. Rice University architectural historian Stephen Fox called it “one of the last intact late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American neighborhoods in a large southern city.” The shotgun houses on its backstreets traced their roots back to Yoruba homebuilding techniques, Fox wrote, and added that they had “been transformed from an architectural emblem of poverty and shame into an icon of Houston.”

That may be, but that didn’t stop Bob Lanier. In 1994, a former city planning commissioner named Julio Laguarta and a suburban developer named Billy Burge came to Lanier with a new plan for the Fourth Ward. Laguarta’s non-profit Houston Renaissance corporation, its board packed with developers and construction company execs, would redevelop the area. Lanier heartily endorsed the plan both in principle and with millions in funding, and almost immediately after Houston Renaissance built its first phase (new townhomes where once had stood shotguns) Lanier ordered up $9 million worth of street and sewer improvements, basic quality-of-life enhancements long denied to the area.

And so the seeds of Freedmen’s Town’s final destruction were sown. As Lanier left office, Houston Press investigative reported Brian Wallstin put it like this: “[T]he Lanier administration ignored the interests of some of the city’s most impoverished citizens while helping to bankroll a plan to turn the Fourth Ward into a settlement of upscale townhomes.”

Which is what it is today, that and a few chi-chi restaurants and oontz-oontz velvet rope nightclubs catering to footloose and fancy-free O&G employees and other well-off young downtown workers. Even its name is gone: almost nobody under 30 calls it Freedmen’s Town or Fourth Ward anymore. These days Midtown is the preferred nomenclature.

Which brings us back to our point. Is it wise to change the name of a school honoring a mostly harmless Confederate poet to one honoring a man who diverted money from public transit badly needed in impoverished minority areas out to places where he personally stood to gain, and played a key role in destroying Houston’s most historic African-American neighborhood?

I put the question to Tim Fleck, a retired journalist and Lanier alum who served as a city hall reporter for the Houston Press and then a member of the Chronicle’s editorial board:

“Well, as a police reporter who spent way too many all-nighters covering murders in the dives of Fourth Ward for the Chronicle, it’s hard to get too nostalgic for the place,” he wrote in an email exchange. “With Bob, I think it was always more about class and business than race. If the inhabitants had been poor whites or Hispanics, he’d still have done the developers’ bidding. Lanier never had any problem employing and being served by African Americans as long as they knew who was boss. That’s still a pretty common attitude among the Houston elite.”

Again, is that the sort of philosophy worthy of an expensive name change for Sidney Lanier? (Proponents of the change claim it will cost $250,000; opponents say it will be double that.)

But if the name must be changed, I want to throw the name of Vassar Miller into the ring. She grew up blocks away from the school (and quite possibly attended it) and overcame cerebral palsy to become a Pulitzer-nominated two-time Texas poet laureate and one of the few Texas writers ever to draw praise from ornery Larry McMurtry. All that, and she claimed to be a descendant of none other than Sidney Lanier himself.

C’mon Houston: choose poetry over politics, just this once.

Get Texas Monthly. Daily.

The State of TexasDailyA daily digest of Texas news, plus the latest from Texas Monthly

Comments

Poetry makes sense for the area since Edgar Allan Poe Elementary is just blocks away!

Johnthec

Fantastic story John. Did Project Rowhouse grow from, or was it in a response to the “rejuvenation” that Lanier pushed for the fourth ward?

Ms. Pris

Project Rowhouses is in Third Ward, it’s not related to that. But Third Ward’s resistance to gentrification can, I believe, be traced in part to the destruction of Freedman’s Town.

Johnthec

Thanks and I wish I understood the Ward system in Houston better than I do.

TQTQ

Great article. Btw – Other streets near the school are Kipling and Hawthorn. Sidney Lanier fits and should remain.

LW Schulin

The changing of the names is such a blatant attempt to eradicate our history. The War Of Northern Aggression wasn’t about slavery. It was about Tyranny. ..power…greed…Quit buying into all the Yankee Myths and folklore. JOHN H. REAGAN..forever.

Wilson James

The War Between the States was about slavery. Period. End of story.

LW Schulin

You’re another foolish, brainwashed sheeple…It was NOT about slavery…PERIOD…END OF STORY

Sky Mirror

“PERIOD…END OF STORY” means that you have already made your mind up and no amount of factual information will ever change your mind. I suppose that you also thing that global warming is a hoax, too. Forget that Glacier National Park is losing their glaciers or that you can now sail your boat from Newfoundland to Alaska in the summer due to the lack of ice at the pole.

Ms. Pris

The secession documents submitted by all of the confederate states make it clear that the reason for secession was to preserve slavery.

LW Schulin

Keep believing the Yankee myth and folklore, sheeple. Of course they say that. They wrote the bullshit.

Ms. Pris

No, the documents of secession were written by the southern states, to declare that they were seceding and why. Get an education sometime, idiot.

L C Black

Just shows how obsolete my education was. I was taught it was also over states rights and the 10th amendment.

WestTexan70

Yep — states’ right to own other people.

jammerjim

Well if you don’t believe the Yankees, maybe you should try reading the stuff that was actually written down by the Southern leaders themselves.

Nope. Straight outta the state archives. Texas used to keep a copy of it on public display, part of a confederate memorial, until it became an embarrassment to the “the war was about states rights” crowd.

Oddly, they never talk about what rights they were worried about losing…

WestTexan70

Don’t bother with LW — that’s a paid, professional troll.

L C Black

That would take effort and study. Too much trouble.

not_Bridget

Secession was all about slavery. At first, the North first fought to preserve the Union–a worthy goal. And slavery ended, too.

(Every time I see “The War of Northern Aggression” I imagine it said in a Foghorn Leghorn voice.)

Jann Jackson

Great article!
Mrs.Wisdom taught history at Lamar in the late 60’s and 70’s. She called the Civil War “The war of Northern aggression”. Her nickname was Tiny
.Tiny High School!
Its clear the board isn’t interested in accurate history, nuance or community. The driving force behind this entire farce is someone’s personal agenda.

Realist50

Great. So if/when her penchant for that terminology becomes a big story, we’ll need to re-name the school again in about 20 years.

Jeff Baloutine

I agree with Lomax on keeping the name of Sidney Lanier Middle School. But I disagree with the analysis of what happened to Freedman’s Town/Fourth Ward. By the 1980s, over 95% of the land was absentee owned. There were some limited preservation solutions still possible, but without control of the land, it was already too late to save much of the neighborhood. Instead, it was allowed to die slowly through neglect and inaction by HUD and the City. Mayor Bob Lanier wasn’t any hero in the redevelopment of the neighborhood that followed, but he never was one to sit on his hands and do nothing, like most other key figures.

L C Black

What the HISD school board has taught the students in the schools by insisting on renaming them is evident. The members who put tax money for renaming schools above programs for education teach another lesson. They might as well have said this to each student.
“Students, be careful what you say, do, or join because if 15 years or 155 years from now someone who never knew you decides you were wrong you will be punished to the fullest extent of their ability.
Just remember whatever you do at your early age, there will be no forgiveness. Nothing you ever say or do can overcome the one thing others decide you did wrong. You might as well give up because you will never be able to do enough good to overcome the one thing we, the elite people who are better than you, decide is the unforgivable sin.
Do not bother us with logic. You will have no recourse because we are your betters.”

not_Bridget

It’s one thing to reconsider removing Sidney Lanier from a school name. But–Jefferson Davis & Robert E Lee? Dump them…

Realist50

Meh. Some interesting history here, but every person – most especially every politician – is going to be imperfect with a mixed legacy that can be criticized for something. The obvious intent here is to remove the Confederate associated name while still keeping “Lanier”, and it seems fair enough for a school to be named after a deceased mayor of the city. Perhaps the best case here is that Sidney Lanier’s connection to the Confederacy is so tenuous that the school shouldn’t be re-named at all.

John Collins

This vote was along racial lines..the races who ruined HISD and turned them into holding pens for worthless nonwhites won

John Collins

How about “Notorious B.I.G or Tupac Shakur High School”..or El Chapo or Pancho Villa high?

Ric Rob

What became of this possible lawsuit against the Houston school district for approving these changes at a cost of millions of tax dollars?

He beat Mayor Whitmire by encouraging Sylvester Turner to run for Mayor ALSO which robbed Mayor Whitmire of the “black caucus vote” that had strongly supported her before Turner ran. “Gamewise,” a very strategic move!!! “Snake-in-the-Grass move?” Absolutely…….was not aware how much land he owned and manipulated Politics to “enhance” the value…….by a HUGE %!!! “Businesswise,” a very strategic move!!! “Snake-in-the-Grass move?” Absolutely……

Get the Magazine

We report on vital issues from politics to education, as well as being the indispensable authority on the Texas scene, covering everything from music to cultural events with insightful recommendations.